AI assistants are creating a whole new way to be found by customers

March 22, 2018

Joe: You’re listening to the Being Found Show, and we are here to help you be found by more buying customers.

I want to talk about Amazon Alexa laughing at people who own it. This is kind of creepy and weird. This AI assistant living in your house and listening to everything you say is now laughing creepily on its own.

Chauncey: I guess Alexa hears certain phrases as a command for Alexa to laugh. There have been people that have heard it and kept looking through their house because they thought there were kids in their house.

Joe: The reason I bring this up is that these AI assistants are creating a whole new way to be found by customers. It is happening fast, and even when we are writing our content and building our websites, we need to think about the way people are going to pronounce those words and find you online. We’ve been seeing this for a few years now that it’s become important to go to more of a natural speech writing as opposed to a super smart style writing, which is interesting because there seems to be two facts there. One is you’re supposed to use natural speech in you’re writing, but also you’re supposed to write at the level of a fourth grader.

Chauncey: Well, Alexa has me thinking that there must be some misunderstanding and I bet you it’s not that Alexa thinks you’re telling it to laugh, but is made so that when it’s active, it responds to you.

Joe: No this is happening when you ask Alexa to order pizza, and it laughs back at you. Amazon is coming back and saying that it is trying to fix this problem and it is a misunderstanding on Alexa’s end.

Back to the idea of the consumer, these devices are becoming a big way that people use the internet. These devices are translating your voice into search. If Alexa laughs when it misunderstands something you said, what will it do when it misunderstands the name of your company? What about when your competitors are more clear in their content that is having a shoe sale, and Alexa decides to serve them up instead of you? Often clients are not completely clear about what they are selling and in this case, that is a huge problem. It is always what the owner thinks is important but they never think about what the customer is looking for.

If I was to ask Alexa to find me a pair of shoes, you should hope that as a shoe salesman, your site is ready to be found and offer me what I am looking for or you can expect to be passed up.

Chauncey: We need to understand now that these devices are translating our voices and if our site isn’t clear to the world of what we are selling, we won’t be served up and our competitors will.

Joe: When surveyed, 84% of people said they use artificial intelligence. The article goes on to talk about how Alexa knows that it is finding the right websites and what you are looking for exactly. That relates to what we talk about all the time with link building and search engine optimization and all that stuff.

Chauncey: That reminds me of something else. When movies first came out, they didn’t know how to appeal to their audience, but over time it all evolved to be exactly what the consumer was looking for. It is the same with Google search. We all learned to refine the ways that we were wording to meet the search engines expectations to get what we wanted out of it. I am sure the same change will happen with voice search.

Joe: Thank you for listening to this segment of the Being Found Show, to hear the full show listen here: Being Found Show Episode #48 or subscribe to our podcast.

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The internet has changed marketing and sales forever! I’m here to make sense of this chaos. I want companies to feel confident in their marketing. To be confident, businesses have to know what has changed, what has stayed the same, and what they can do about it.